© Zani-Casadio
Chaos String Quartet
Susanne Schäffer, Eszter Kruchió violins
Sara Marzadori viola
Bas Jongen cello
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy
Quartet in A minor Op. 13
György Ligeti
Quartet no. 1 “Métamorphoses nocturnes”
Claude Debussy
Quartet in G minor, Op. 10
in collaboration with Scuola di Musica di Fiesole
ECMA – European Chamber Music Academy
The year Beethoven died, 1827, was also the year that his last five quartets appeared in print. His enigmatic legacy did not go unnoticed by young Mendelssohn, whose Quartet no. 2 shows Beethoven’s influence in the Lied-like quality of its first movement, and especially in its cyclic form and complex variation principle. These are the very features that make up the impressionistic harmonic and timbric texture of Debussy’s Op.10, and that, in the different atmosphere of the mid-XX-century, resurface in Ligeti’s Metamorphoses—“nocturnal”, intimate, private, and safe from the restrictions by the Budapest regime. So, if what the young virtuosos of the Chaos String Quartet share is a desire to “explore extremes and welcome the unpredictable”, who, better than them, could make life sprout from the seeds of a “future” sown almost two centuries ago?